'The Skin I Live In' review: a castle, a mad scientist, a sexy monster, and Almodovar magic

Part “Vertigo,” part “Beauty and the Beast,” part “Bride of Frankenstein,” Pedro Almodóvar’s“The Skin I Live In” is yet another casually masterful work from a director who has barely put a foot wrong in his 30 (!) years of feature filmmaking.

Once again, Almodóvar proves a graceful stylist and poised provocateur with a streak of sexual daring and potent gifts for melodrama, comedy and pathos. More than that, he is able, like such titans of the medium as Hitchcock and Renoir and Wilder and Scorsese to imprint all manner of material with the unmistakable marks of his craft and his personality. You can always tell an Almodóvar film, whether from a plot description or a few moments of footage or even a still shot. His is the sort of talent which the auteur theory was, justifiably, devised to explain.

In “Skin,” Almodóvar is reunited with Antonio Banderas, whom he discovered in 1982’s “Labyrinth of Passion” and helmed to stardom in such films as “Law of Desire” (1987) “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988), and “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” (1990), their last collaboration to now.

With graying temples and a grave demeanor, Banderas plays Robert Ledgard, a plastic surgeon who has walled himself up in a fortress-like laboratory to work on developing a new form of human skin that would be impervious to injuries of the sort which proved fatal to his wife in a car accident. This sounds like a noble effort, but Ledgard is pursuing it by experimenting on unwilling subjects -- young people whom he has kidnapped and who don’t fare especially well in his care.

After years of failure and another grievous personal loss, Ledgard seems to have achieved some success with Vera (Elena Anaya), an androgynous creature whom the professor keeps sequestered with the help of his maid, the loyal and creepy Marilia (Almodóvar regular Marisa Paredes). The story of how Vera came to be the subject of Ledgard’s ministrations -- and the forms that those ministrations have taken -- makes up the bulk of the story.

The Almodóvarian touches are unmistakable: the frank and twisted sexuality; the artist (for what else is Ledgard?) hero; the painful and comical coincidences and repetitions; the exacting schemes of color, movement and sound; the cinematic allusions; the deftly broken-and-rebuilt chronology. “Skin” is based on a novel by the French writer Thierry Jonquet (it has been translated under the titles “Mygale” and “Tarantula”), but it easily could have been a work of Almodóvar’s own inspiration.

Banderas makes a triumphal return to Spanish filmmaking, infusing Ledgard with sufficient suavity and authority to mask his psychotic obsession. And Anaya is miraculous -- nimble and daring and fetching and as alert as a cat waiting for a chance to escape her captor/creator’s clutches.

That there’s something creepy at the heart of “Skin” should surprise no one who’s seen Almodóvar’s “Matador” or “Talk to Her” or “Bad Education” or “Live Flesh,” which is also based on a novel and which, I think, this new film most resembles. Only Hitchcock, after all, regularly brought to the screen the same ability to combine glamour and perversity while still mounting entertaining narratives.

And while it may be true that Almodóvar doesn’t have Hitchcock’s way with terror, it’s not clear that Hitchcock could leave the real world behind so wholly and convincingly as Almodóvar does here. The twisted fairy tale aspects of “Skin” evoke Jean Cocteau, another of Almodóvar’s masters. And it’s a measure of Almodóvar’s skill that you can’t tell where one influence ends and another begins. His signature is so strong that he can steal from the best and make it all seem his own -- and that is meant entirely as praise.